The works in this exhibition issue from journeys undertaken by
Ponomarev: to the Arctic, to the bottom of the ocean, and while tracking
the 60th latitude of the Atlantic onboard a scientific
research ship. All of these voyages imply unbelievable stories: about
how the artist managed to persuade an admiral to allow him to paint an
operational nuclear submarine with colourful markings. Or, how he
convinced the commander of Russia’s Northern Fleet to marshal ships and a
smoke screen in order to make a real island disappear. Such tales raise
the question – Why? It is here that the true adventure begins,
for Ponomarev’s art invites meditation on the relationship between
illusion/fiction and ‘reality’, the utility of art, and the shifting
tides of personal and cultural history. Moreover, his practice effects
powerful and surprising conjunctions between aspects of cultural and
natural life that are frequently, ostensibly, separate. His works forge
lived connections between naval officers and esoteric philosophy, the
Italian renaissance and torpedoes, the romantic landscape and
geopolitical conflict over natural resources. His practice is at once
metaphysical and intensely material.
The ocean has been called the principle dramatis persona of
Ponomarev’s oeuvre. Of course, his previous employment as a nautical
engineer, submariner and merchant-seaman bears upon this fact. However,
the consistent references to water have more than biographical
significance. When asked about the issue of symbolism, the artist often
invokes concepts and terminology from Eastern metaphysics – such as he
old Mongolian word ‘dalai’.1
This translates as ‘ocean’ but carries an extra sense: oneness or
totality. He also refers to the Upanishads, and the metaphor that is
Indra’s Net. As with the previous example, its concept is that of the
primordial interconnectedness of all things.2
In other words, Ponomarev’s ocean signifies the idea of an
all-encompassing non-individuated reality that underlies appearances,
which subtends seemingly discrete entities, gathering them together in
its ontological web.3
In the Vedas the idea of primordial unity justifies rejecting the everyday world, for the latter is conceived to be a ‘veil of Maya’,
mere illusion which distracts one from the more fundamental ‘reality’.
Appearance is downgraded, and this means that the manifestation of
(individual) self is to be abandoned however possible. For centuries,
sects have outlined various methods for achieving this release, such as
meditation and mantra. For the ancient Greeks it was Dionysian orgies,
ecstatic intoxication through drink, dance and song. In the 19th
century, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer claimed that
‘reality’ could only be approached through ‘non-empirical’ cognition,
advocating aesthetic experience – including exposure to art – as key to
removing the veil. Perhaps influenced by the watery imagery of dalai, he
described the illusion in nautical language: “Just as the boatman sits
in his small boat, trusting his frail craft in the stormy sea that is
boundless in every direction, rising and falling with the howling,
mountainous waves, so […] the individual man calmly sits, supported by
and trusting the principium individuationis”.4
According to his vision, removing the veil of Maya is akin to the boat
overturning and the boatman being plunged into the boundless ocean, his
(individual) self-conception lost in the profound deep.
Schopenhauer’s boatman finds an echo in Ponomarev’s Deep Water Graphics
(2010), a new series of ten self-portraits on polystyrene cups, created
while onboard a Russian scientific ship. Thrown overboard and then
dragged to the ocean floor in heavyweight containers, each image was
distorted and shrunk by subjection to water-pressure at depths of up to
4km below sea level. In consigning these pictures to the abyss
Ponomarev’s ‘self’ is, quite literally, reduced. Thus, the works proffer
empirical access to the undertow, physical evidence of the meta-‘truth’
that the principle of (self) individuation is tenuous and
context-specific. The resulting objects, which have been recovered for
our benefit, are a kind of self-destruction/reduction as proof of ‘real’
life. They are also a kind of resurrection.
Another work demonstrates even more spectacular engagement with this metaphysical terrain. Maya: A Lost Island
(2000) is a video work in two parts. The first screen shows Ponomarev
scratching away at a paper map, removing all symbolic trace of the
eponymous land mass. It is erasure performed in a perfunctory manner –
easily done, like deleting an unfortunate sentence from an otherwise
satisfactory text. In the second video one encounters the realization of
this gesture on a massive scale. It is footage showing the Northern
Fleet of the Russian Navy deploying maritime flares to make a real
island, in the Barents sea, disappear. The action is an incredible
counterpoint to the individual performance. Ponomarev’s project draws a
veil of smoky artifice over a place whose name signifies delusion. It
depicts a ‘real’ chimera, Maya, wrapped in an illusion – a powerful
paradox.
Ponomarev’s actions at sea may be described as courses charted across
the field of oneness or counter-intuitive conjunction. But his art is
not merely esoteric. Indeed, his symbolism cannot be understood
without attention to its social depth or dimension. Unity is achieved
only through surmounting practical challenges, “as a voyage”. The
military-artistic action that conditioned Maya: A Lost Island did
not come about by filling out an application form. It was the end
result of what Ponomarev calls his “strategy of adventure” – an
intensely pragmatic and socially engaged practice. “As an explorer, I
like frontiers”, he says, “but many people, including critics, do not
understand this. I have followed, and follow, borders, but do not intend
to live according to established institutions. If an artist starts
living that way, he ceases to be an artist. […] I [step] into a
different space. To implement my constructions I [have] to penetrate
other spheres and demonstrate my artistic activity there – which is a
social and cultural act”.5 These words also apply to The Northern Trace of Leonardo
(1996), whereby Ponomarev convinced an admiral to admit him to a secret
naval base. Eventual consent was the result of the artist’s dogged
pursuit of serendipitous connections, laborious negotiations and
important drinking sessions. After further weeks pursuing the ‘strategy’
on site – typified by leading grizzled submariners in a vodka-fuelled
sing-a-long of Yellow Submarine – his ambitious goal became reality: he
was granted permission to paint one of the nuclear submarines with
‘anti-camouflage’ designs. When the vessel was properly decorated it
left the harbour in order to ‘sew’ his signature into the ocean.
Such actions – convincing the otherwise inscrutable Russian Navy to do
his unlikely bidding, to make his caprice a collective project – are a
testament to Ponomarev’s charisma. The man can – in a figure of speech
not so far from the truth – move mountains. In a sense, he is an
intoxicant, and it should be noted that he often quotes from Rimbaud’s The Drunken Boat
(1871) when talking about his work. Such projects effect the
convergence of apparently isolated activities, objects, ideas and civil
identifications. They culminate in a kind of social-artistic euphoria,
the drunken slip of Schopenhauer’s boatman overboard, into dalai. But in the aforementioned examples the lost principium
is not so much ‘self’ as it is the Russian Navy’s separation from ‘art’
and/or Ponomarev himself – terms which may be taken as metonyms for all
the military’s ‘others’.6 The lack of distinction between the artist’s imaginative goals and those of the navy represents an underlying – (sub)cultural
– ‘reality’. This is to say, without an ‘other’ there can be no
(military) conflict and its attendant suffering. One does not have to
subscribe to antiquated metaphysics to appreciate this vision. Indeed,
we may recall a statement made by the fictional Captain Nemo, one of
Ponomarev’s heroes: “The sea cannot be controlled by tyrants. They can
still raise lawlessness on the sea surface, wage wars and kill their own
kind. However, underwater at the depth of thirty feet they are
powerless and their might simply wanes! Oh! Come to live in the depths
of the seas!”7 A Situationist slogan also springs to mind: ‘Under the paving stones – the beach!’
However, non-individuation is also challenging – the precious glimpse of
an excruciating secret, like staring at the sun. Yes, it is a joy to
see a tool of war – the submarine – ‘returned’ to art, its stealth
function reversed. Likewise, it is nice to know that weapons have been
misused to produce smoky poetry – the epic picturesque of Maya: A Lost Island.
But under the purview of Ponomarev’s metaphorical-metaphysics, whimsy
performs a dialectical somersault, the temporary social utopia described
by relational aesthetics is foreclosed; it is apparent that organized
war-structures are moved by folly. Somewhere, a death-dealing system may
be in thrall to a veritable Don Quixote! Moreover, as exemplified by
the The Northern Trace of Leonardo, art plays handmaiden to
subjugation and an anti-human functionality. It ‘decorates’ it. In fact,
Ponomarev employs the submarine as a metaphor for the vicissitudes of
human imagination, undercutting the common association of art and
technology with the good:
According to myth, Prometheus gave the man the gift of fire, and with it
the ‘arts of civilization’ – including mathematics, science and
agriculture – so that we might not live ‘in holes, like swarms of ants,
[o]r in deep sunless caves’.8
But his reward was suffering. Chained to a rock, Zeus sent a vulture to
tear out his liver and each night, following the day’s mutilation, the
organ would regenerate so that torture could recommence at sunrise. The
noble intention, the gift of knowledge, attended by agony – a fate worse
than death. Such hyperbolic misery aims to impart the lesson that
‘wrongdoing is of necessity imposed’ on titanic striving.9
Elsewhere, Oedipus stabs out his own eyes. Why? He is not just trying
to punish himself for the transgression of coitus with his own mother.10
He is trying to un-know. The destruction of his capacity for sight is
an impotent attempt to draw a veil over the truth that he previously
sought. He wants to plunge the truth into darkness, to make it disappear
– but to only skin-deep avail.
We still recall these myths – and hence their lesson – because they are
relevant. Consider the title of a biography for the so-called ‘father’
of the atomic bomb, Robert J. Oppenheimer: American Prometheus.11
It was ‘truth’ – in physics – that he sought first, only to lament its
discovery. ‘[I]n some sort of crude sense’, he wrote, ‘which no
vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the
physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they
cannot lose’. American Oedipus would have been a better title. Before
him lived an Italian Oedipus: Leonardo Da Vinci’s striving did not just
produce the Last Supper but – somewhat less celebrated in
schoolbooks – designs for armoured vehicles including tanks and a
submarine. He was not the only contemporary giant to master the art of
war. Verrocchio was employed to cast bronze cannons for Lorenzo di
Medici and before him Giotto designed the fortifications of Florence. In
such figures the roles of artist and war-engineer, man of science and
man of suffering, were combined. Indeed, these ‘humanists’ and
visionaries developed creative ways to end human life. Da Vinci was
hardly insensitive to the tragic dimension of his talent. In fact – as
Ponomarev has noted – he encrypted his submarine designs, justifiably
fearing that his idea would lead to ‘murder at the bottom of the seas’.
His inner oracle spoke truth. Subsequently – in a manner of speaking –
the coitus of this great renaissance artist and Oppenheimer resulted in
the nuclear sub, a key representative of mutually assured destruction.12
Thus, Ponomarev’s submarine is a potent metaphor for the potentially
tragic convergence of interests and/or functions in highly creative
endeavours. In a common turn of phrase, one encounters an ‘iron fist
clad in a velvet glove’. Conversely, we may picture Leonardo’s velvet
hand – the touch which rendered La Gioconda’s smile – encased in
an iron gauntlet. The symbolic function of the submarine encapsulates
both scenarios. It seems related to the centaur allegory as
characterized by Niccolò Machiavelli – its face speaks sense or ‘law’,
and perhaps beauty, but its posterior is a brute with cloven hooves.13
More generally, the submarine underscores the relationship between
surface and – hidden – depths, representing passage from one reality to
another; the tension and interrelation between the visible and the
invisible; consciousness and the sub-conscious. Base
(2003) illustrates such conceptual terrain. The work was created while
the artist undertook a residency at the former studio of the sculptor
Alexander Calder, who was also, at one time, a seaman. It is a
nine-metre-long tube mounted horizontally on steel scaffolding, filled
with a tonne of water. This structure forms a tunnel through which a
miniature sub travels. At the end of a slow journey the black craft
rises from the liquid, raised by a winch system, before performing a
chameleon-like transformation in which its exterior blushes with
brightly hued markings. The sea-change in its appearance issues from the
drying of water sensitive paint. The model vessel’s journey from
darkness to light, and vice-versa, is a model for life itself.
A video work called Heliotropism (2005) also situates existential
and mortal drama in relation to the themes of ascent and descent. It
begins by showing an industrial-looking cabin which could be the
interior of a rusting spacecraft. A few inhabitants – hard at work,
swearing like Russian sailors – people the capsule, fixing god knows
what with hammers and spanners. Their work is interrupted by a series of
banging jolts, prompting more swearing and further activity. At the end
of this hazy process a somewhat shaken Ponomarev exits the
claustrophobic space and greets the sun with a deep breath and a
relieved facial expression. He is above deck on a small vessel in the
middle of the ocean. What seemed to be a creaking Sputnik was actually a
lifeboat from the research ship Academic Sergei Vavilov – the footage
recorded its descent from stowed position high above the water to its
splashdown in the Atlantic. The boatmen were trying to detach the craft
from its tethers and seal the relevant hatches. The jolts were crashes
into the side of the mother ship, caused by wind during the precarious
drop. It was desperate activity on a rickety lifeboat – the
absurd work of self-preservation – and a plunge towards the ocean before
greeting the heavens. The fog of uncertainty clears: it is another of
the artist’s parables.
*
Ponomarev’s symbols are highly charged in the context of contemporary
geo-political conflict over natural resources. In fact, both the
submarine and the Arctic play central roles in the new ‘great game’. In
August 2007 a Russian submersible dived deep below the North Pole. Then,
at a depth of 4,261 metres, its mechanical arm dropped a titanium flag
onto the seabed. Since then four other polar nations have attempted to
prove that their continental shelves extend into Arctic waters. Their
respective goals are the same – to secure rights to hitherto unclaimed
stores of minerals, oil and gas. Industrial exploitation of such
reserves is only possible now, given the year-round opening of the
Northwest Passage – a sea route linking the Atlantic and Pacific. This
new Arctic highway is the result of climate change, which has reduced
the average amount of pack ice in the region. If the booty is
successfully extracted, pollution resulting from its use will compound
the effect on this region – and, consequently, the rest of the planet.
In light of this geo-political drift towards the poles, and to the
bottom of the Arctic Ocean, we might read the metaphorical reduction of
self in Ponomarev’s Deep Water Graphics as a warning: If we go overboard then we are lost. It seems there are further depths to his art.